Hare and Tortoise
How Social Democratic Party leader Pamela Rendi-Wagner suddenly became the most popular politician in Austria -- for now, at least
Servus!
It is not often that one gets to pass on positive news about the state of social democracy in Austria these days. In 2019’s parliamentary elections, the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) succumbed to its worst result in the 100-year history of the Austrian Republic: a truly dismal 21.1 percent. This, from the party of Bruno Kreisky who—as the SPÖ itself likes to remind us often—led the party through five successive election victories between 1970 and 1983, holding a majority in parliament for 12 of those 13 years. “Our course is the right one,” SPÖ leader Pamela Rendi-Wagner said on election night 2019. Somehow, she maintained a straight face.
September 29, 2019 was the SPÖ’s nadir. Since then, the situation has stabilized and the past twelve months haven’t been as bad as all that. First came January 2020’s statewide elections in Burgenland on the Hungarian border in which the SPÖ led by former defense minister Hans Peter Doskozil won 49.9 percent of the vote, recapturing the absolute majority in the state parliament it lost in 2010. October saw the SPÖ hold onto city government in Vienna, upping their vote share by 2 percent to 41.6 percent. Local elections in Styria produced mixed results, though in Vorarlberg, the SPÖ captured the mayoralties in Bregenz, the state capital, and Hard in September.
That the SPÖ continues to rule in Red Vienna is not that surprising, and indeed, it would be troubling if they didn’t. The news which broke on Monday, on the other hand, that Rendi-Wagner is now the most popular politician in the country, very much came as a bolt from the blue. For years, chancellor Sebastian Kurz towered above all others as Austria’s most beloved politician. He was finally usurped about five months ago by health minister Rudolf Anschober. Now both of them find their approval ratings underwater (-10 for Kurz, -4 for Anschober) as the country struggles to get a grip and its corona infection rate low enough to end the winter lockdown.
This represents quite the turnaround for a leader previously seen as a drag on her already-ailing party—a political outsider who, since taking the helm in November 2018, has struggled to seize the helm of one of Austria’s two parties of state. Her tenure to date has been marked not only by electoral failure, as mentioned, but party-political infighting, hesitant, defensive interviews, and outright PR disasters. Hardly surprising, then, that in February 2020, her approval rating was -27. Only 18 percent of Austrians said they liked her. Well, that number has now doubled to 36 percent and her approval is in the black at +7.
What happened, it seems, was the third lockdown, which began on Boxing Day. Rendi-Wagner, a trained physician, came into politics in 2017 as Austria’s health minister, having built up a reputation as an expert in matters of epidemiology and vaccination in London and Vienna. Her posture since the beginning of the corona crisis has been that of a reasoned expert and constructive critic. Rendi-Wagner is in all the papers today, for example, arguing for mass at-home testing of the population and the opening of emergency vaccination production facilities in Europe. The government’s general mishandling of the response to the virus since the fall has gradually opened up a space for her points and arguments to break through with the wider public.
Of course, if one builds up one’s reputation as an expert during a time of crisis, what happens once that crisis has passed? That much is to be determined, though suffice it to say the glacial pace of the vaccine rollout means that this crisis is far from over. Perhaps state-level elections in Upper Austria due to take place this autumn will be a guide as to whether Rendi-Wagner’s new-found popularity can translate into electoral gains for the SPÖ.
Bis bald!
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